80 Responses to “Atomic Cowgirl”

It’s sad but true. It don’t matter if you can move mountains or hover eons ahead of the best minds of your era, it won’t be easy for a eunuch or a butchy lady.

It’s a tragedy that the world will give a woman everything even when she’s bereft of talent, or basic human compassion (I’m looking at you, Megan Fox) just because she a sexpot, yet being an atomic cowgirl will net you nothing but humiliating newspaper headlines.

Truly an excellent comment on gender and sexuality. I assume the mules eunuch qualities were intentional in your message.

“Y’ can’t show a man th’ obvious if he didn’t notice it himself” – sure you can, he just won’t notice it. “Can’t explain physics to a mule” – sure you can, it just won’t understand. Ah. I get it now, damned brain-lag.

Love this Shango character: anyone else hear a soundtrack with dust and spurs?

*WARNING- Ridiculously long and boring text follows, skip right to end for most important point*

The average historian would probably give his eye teeth (and several other body parts) in order to get a hold of a story like this if it were true. If only for the oppurtunity to have a look at a talking mule and get the lucrative Mr Ed/ Talking mule debate finally closed.

Plus, the unfortunate factor is that any historian who does do prominenet research on a time period like this is generally ignored for the one who writes “Prostitution through the ages part XVII- The Ol’ West” and gets it popularly published.

Its not neccesarily the establishment keeping your superpowered atomic beings down, its the fact that if they don’t actually do anything noteable then they probably aren’t going to be recorded. Even blowing up a town wouldn’t be that special in the old west, if this lady had turned up in Europe, THEN she would have been noticed.

I first of all want to say that I’ve been following your comic for some time and it really is a cut above a lot of what is out there. That said, I hope you don’t mind a touch of constructive criticism about this one? I saw somebody doing it for the last comic, so if you’re going to start beheading people, you can start with him.

The problem I see with this joke is that you sacrificed the humour for commentary close to the end. I’m willing to read into what happens if you let me – once you start just flat-out telling me that it’s about the impossibility of changing racial and gender attitudes and so on and so on, it goes from being subtext to wall-of-text, in a way that robs the joke of most of its pacing. If you give us a chance to realize what you’re talking about ourselves you engage us as equals – the wall of text right around when the sheriff shows up onward is just a bit patronizing.

The joke itself is funny, and up to your usual artistic standards (i.e., excellent); I did enjoy the strip. Plus your ability to come up with the strangest situations is still as winning as it ever was. My two cents is just that the strip is a bit bloated – feel free to call me a moron, block me from posting, and totally ignore me if you like. It’s your comic and your choice.

Well now……Ain’t that there a thing of bewdy and inventiveness! Gorgeous and beauteous! A MARVEL to read and admire.
I’m afraid you need to do more with her and this whole idea of anachronistic oublients!

How’s about supplying us with a 300+ DPI image so’s we can scroll right up ‘n down that there thing, boy howdy!

Trenino: I’m not saying the entire comic was an excuse to draw people sailing through the air, but it was definitely the most fun part.

GerryB: Oh, they’re not impossible, there’s always a couple, I just fix them before i do the coloring.

The Last Melon: Hey, relax, constructive criticism is encouraged around here. Fair point with regard to the subtext issue. It’s just one of the problems in doing comix: how far do you go in spelling things out? Do you go subtle knowing that a lot of people will miss it, or do you spell things out knowing that a lot of people will feel talked down to? In this case i felt that there was still a lot for the reader to decide on their own based on the relatively overt ideas at the end of the strip. Can prejudice be changed or not? I didn’t think i provided an answer, mostly because i don’t know the answer. You suggest that the answer’s yes, that the end is about the “impossibility of changing racial and gender attitudes,” whereas to me if the comic was about anything it was more about the subjective nature of the historical record in light of racial and gender attitudes, and maybe to someone else it was about mules and maybe to another person it was just a bunch of silly jokes about cowboys, and i’m fine with any of those interpretations. You’re right in that humor was sacrificed for commentary at the end, but to counter i’d sat that i’m not sure if that’s what i’d call a sacrifice (but that’s a whole other issue…).

I may not be a fan of the social commentary, but hot DAMN to I love the dialect, artwork, and characterization. Best panel is the hooker, in the barrel, suspended in midair. I had kind of envisioned the cowboy in panel 10 hitting on her: “Well boy howdy, little lady, if’n you’s looking for a MAN that’s ten thousand times stronger than er’rebody in the town rolled together, ain’t you fergit my name…” *sleazy over-the-shoulder glance*

Funny, I read the entire comments and saw nothing on how you’re some type of feminist NaZi or whatever.

Quite enjoy your comics, though I do take them more facetiously then you may hope.

This one was especially enjoyable. Though I must say if you try to continue this it may grow redundant. So as a bit of advice, if you do decide to continue on this, try to keep it fresh, and maybe expand from the “cowboys are sexist” realm.

Part of the fun of this strip is that it IS so outrageous. You never know what’s coming next. I’ll wait for when Shango meets up with the time traveling Nazis, unless, of course, the Sphinx eats them first.

Well don’t that beat all, a canuck thinks he can draw a comic book with some sort of intellectual pretext like a real american. Now ain’t that just adorable? Now I’m off to go shop for hats and the li-

yes! i love these kinds of non-sense comics that you do! they’re filled with ridiculous people and outrageous plots. I was disappointed that there was a message, though. I just want absolute mind rot. You get so preachy sometimes, you know? (:

after reading this, the previous (on the bus) and the “weird” comic, I am now 100% positively sure there are people thinking like I am and therefor answering one of the main theme questions from my “being-a-kid-phisically” period in life.

Hi, I was stumbling around online and I think I found one of your comics…and I thought I’d excerpt it on my blog…but it wasn’t credited…so i took a couple of lines and googled and found ten references….and only ONE of them seemed to imply it was by Subnormality. So I found your site and have been spending some time enjoying it (although I didn’t see the original comic, which I think is called “Things they don’t tell you but should”) and I want to ask you…does it piss you off when you’re not credited? Or don’t you care? This is probably an obvious question because it would certainly piss ME off, and if I excerpt something on my blog, I always link back and only use photos I can credit (with a rare exception, where I can’t find the original source) but it seems so many sites are sloppy or selfish…

Am I right in construing this as a commentary on the lack of people to acknowledge the peaks of true talent/expertise/whatever in a society that is only alive because it has been stabilized by seeing everything and everyone in a prejudicial light that gives the abnormalities a normality we can bear?

I’m not sure how much this’ll count for in the creator of this comic’s book. Or hell, if he/she (I assume it’s a she because of seemingly main female characters but being on the internet of a good fair time has taught me that the expected isn’t always what it appears to be) even reads these. But there’s a little part of my brain. I’m not quite sure where it is, or how it works honestly. I gave up on figuring out those kinds of things when I realized that if I tried to keep figuring out how my own mind worked I might just quite get lost in it, and in a dozen other things, that in the end, would either leave me in asylum, crazy, poor, or stupidly rich or quite possibly moderate, and chance isn’t my thing at this point in life. But when I read this comic…for a while, that part of my brain is satisfied, -because- nothing is how it should seem or would be, a subtle underchanging in the way the minds of men work, and..it pleases me. Sometimes, it’s nice to think how much different the world would be if all people were fair-thinking like this. But it’s not quite off I’d imagine. It’s just that I can’t find those people, or that I’ve just neglected listening to them. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to. And that most certainly will be a happy day. Bravo, and keep it up.

Apologies unnecessary friend, the letter will live, and I can no more hold claim to a word than I can say the seas belong to me! Carry on about it! And looking forward to the next comics and such Winston!